Can snowboarding get its groove back?

From a public relations perspective, snowboarding has had a bit of a rough year. First, the sport’s truly bonafide superstar, Shaun White, joined other ne’er do wells like Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong in a sort of athlete Hall of Shame.

Then came a story by New York Times freelancer Chris Solomon, entitled Has Snowboarding Lost its Edge? that spread virally throughout the ski and snowboard industry, even though the statistics showed a fairly limited decline in ridership.

Snowboarding is certainly no Johnny Come Lately to the winter recreation scene; indeed, it’s now been around long enough that pioneers like Jake Burton Carpenter and Tom Sims are in various halls of fame and have been recognized for their service to the sport. Indeed, Sims’s sudden death last year could be interpreted as perhaps a symbolic blow to the sport.

Transworld Snowboarding magazine hosts an annual industry forum that brings together the movers and shakers in the sport. This year, one of the sport’s true innovators, Flow Binding CEO Anthony Scaturro penned his thoughts about the sport’s future in a column for the Transworld Business website.

The original letter deals with topics more germane to snowboarding’s insiders than the public at large, but here are the more notable comments:

“On a (more) lack-luster note, the data presented by Kelly Davis paints a bleak picture of snowboarding unit and dollar sales over the last few years… Clearly the numbers are in decline so let’s face the music and do something about it to change the situation and help to ensure that there is no basis for such an article in the future.

We hear more than ever that skiing is cooler than snowboarding. Do we accept this? We blame the economy, weather, and the price of lift tickets and the cost of equipment. Is this really the root of the problem? The true test is in how we rise to the occasion and overcome the situation of poor consumer demand and the resulting, undeniable decline in snowboarding unit sales. Like Dr. Peter Philips, the Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, said when commenting about our industry in relation to the challenging economic times: “you are now all sitting at the adult table.” So true!

No doubt times are tough, but as the late and great Bruce Lee said, “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”

The comments which accompanied the story certainly show a passion for the sport that many of the sport’s practitioners still have.

What’s your take on it - do you ski, or snowboard? Can snowboarding get its groove back?

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Can snowboarding get its groove back?

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